Services and things that I use

Wed, Jan 16, 2019

I use the following tools, products and services to do the things I do. Up to date as of the post’s publish date above.

Just to heads you up, some of the links below are affiliate links, I’ve marked them with “#ad”, however I would never recommend something just because there’s a chance I could make a quick buck off you signing up. That’s gross. I search for affiliate programs on products I like rather than products based on affiliate programs I like.

I absolutely do recommend anything that is listed on this page, ad or not, and none of the #ad links will ever take anything away from you. In any case feel free to copy the link and strip off the referral code - no hard feelings!

If a service sucks it straight up wont be listed here.

Website makin’

Laravel - Current website building love. At one point I needed to build a non-WordPress site and stumbled across Laravel. Since then I’ve used it for basically every rando project and a few commercial sites/systems. I like it I do.

Hugo - A new addition. Static site generator that replaces instances where I’d have previously used WordPress. Read more on the switch here. Useful for blog-type websites and landing pages. Hosted on Netlify.

Podcast doin’

I love Transistor because for less than the price of hosting 2 podcasts in most places* you can create an entire podcasting empire under the one account, even if the podcasts never get an episode. Elsewhere those dead ideas would be costing you $12 or so each every month*. Honestly if nothing else the real reason I like Transistor so much is that I was working on a similar myself and they nailed the features I was planning on building.

* I don’t count free podcast hosts in this because.. where do they earn their money? 🤔

Server hostin’

Everything servery I run is currently hosted on either of

Scaleway - Currently the main server host as I was tinkering with the dynamic disks and whatnot while shrinking down my server costs and sorta got stuck into it

Content servin’

Netlify - Static site hosting. A new addition that came in when I switched the sites to Hugo. It filled a need I had for auto-build, auto-deploy, hosting, content delivery I was planning on doing with Forge, DigitalOcean, and Cloudflare. One provider that replaced 3! Read more here.

BunnyCDN - Using BunnyCDN for anything that needs a CDN. At the time of writing that’s just the image cache for YogsDB

Amazon AWS - Probably no real reason to even link these guys but just in case, Amazon’s AWS gets a shoutout. I mostly use AWS for internal domain stuff with Route53 and S3 for object storage

Cloudflare - I use Cloudflare in front of my sites so that hopefully visitors even distant from the origin servers get a zippy response. At the time of writing I don’t have any of their paid features so I’m a giant leech upon their kindness.

Email receivin’

Fastmail #ad - Fastmail handles the inbound for most of my domains then forwards everything to my Gmail account and no longer forwards to Gmail. I rage quite Google after they announced they’re going to retire Inbox.

Sendy #ad - I use Sendy for email lists because it’s super flexible and self hosted. I realise they market it on sending via Amazon SES but I have it set up using SMTP settings with Mailgun

Mailgun - Easily send email outbound without setting up a mail server and dealing with blocklists and reputation scores. Also it has a sweet inbound mail function that passes a nicely-parsed JSON version of emails which I have yet to use, but can’t wait to do so.

Domain buyin’

Namecheap #ad - I believe at the time of writing all of my domains are now at Namecheap, maybe a straggler or two I’m waiting on the renewal date to be closer before moving. I used to use NearlyFreeSpeech.net for domains but switched to Namecheap at some point, can’t even remember why honestly. NFSN get an honorary mention as they’re a great service too, I just no longer use them.

Secondary

Why you got 2 PCs tho

Because I keep telling myself I’m gonna stream some day. The secondary PC does things like run OBS Studio and has an Elgato HD60 Pro in it so that the main PC can do its thing without using resources for streaming or recording. That way we also get the sad trombone moments of the PC crashing and rebooting all without dropping the stream. Hooray!

For the same reason all of my audio goes through the secondary PC. It’s one heck of a convoluted setup, the physical hardware is plugged in to secondary and then uses Voicemeeter Banana to send audio streams over the network to (Mic input) and from (System/Game/Etc sound) the main PC. With this setup I can be playing a game and still use in-game chat and all that without having to do something similar in a physical audio cable setup. Noice!

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